An important communication primitive in Smart Grid advanced metering infrastructure networks is multicast. Group-based network management operations and firmware downloading are just a couple of examples where multicast is used extensively. To efficiently support multicast, certain implementations utilize a plurality of time-based events, such as a Trickle algorithm, to manage the multicast disseminations. Trickle-based multicast specifies a network-layer forwarding strategy that implements a controlled flood with adaptive retransmission timers and suppression techniques.